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Category: Ubuntu

I often to backups before big changes to my system, or just hacks that I am not sure if it will blow up my system.

Sometimes I run Unity from time to time and I am not sure if other back systems run in a similar fashion, but I assume they do. The program I used for this particular back up was Gnome Disks. Since I am normally a KDE user I had to figure out how to mount the img file without being in a GTK environment.

Fourtantely it is fairly easy to do. Just three commands.

This mounts the image.

sudo losetup -f -P DiskImage.img

This displays the devices partition layout and assignments.

lsblk -f

This mounts the partition table. Make sure you change /dev/loop0p7 to your device.

A lot of the time in Windows 10 you have to deal with an issue where it doesn’t completely close the drive so that it can “fash-boot” and unlucky for us Linux developers actually respect this setting without clobbering it. Because in all actuality it might be an important thing to pay attention to. For example if you suspended the drive making alterations may effect your next wake up event. So if you need to access the drive and you don’t want to jump into Windows and disable that feature all together so you can access the data from Linux you can use 1 simple command and mount the drive in read-only mode.

udisksctl mount –block-device /dev/sda1 –options ro

If you don’t know the part that is /dev/sda1 would be your drive. You can figure out which drive is which by using :

I got an error in my tmux session that was effecting my work flow in vim as well as just general konsole sessions while search apt, or whatever. I thought I would share the solution in case some one ran into the problem.

Basically they made a trivial change, probably a micro level change that really bothered a programmer and their pet project. Totally understandable, but it is just too bad I didn’t hear about it and it is hard to track these things down. I suppose I will make more of an effort to check up on these things when upgrading to the next LTS. Right now I went from Kubuntu14.04 to Kubuntu16.04.

Any way lets get to it. Simply change :

set -g mode-mouse on

to

set -g mouse on

Now you will have the ability to scroll with the trackpad, or mouse if on a desktop. This should only effect users coming from a version less then 2.1, since that is when the change took effect.

A common saying around the Linux community is that it is less likely you will get a virus. Some people even claim you can’t get any, but I think most Linux users know viruses/malware/nasty stuff do exist for Linux and we need to be security minded just like any other computer user regardless of software running on the machine. One major problem I think some times people forget about is this awesome yet dangerous program called Wine. It is a combatability layer that doesn’t have any sandboxing at all. If it works on Windows you just opened yourself up to a much wider variety of issues. The vast majority of desktop users are OSX and Windows users so this can keep us little Linux guys some what safe just because it serves little purpose to target us. As Linux matures on the desktop and gains more adoption I think we need to start taking a look at what this attack vector could mean and how we could help users by limiting exposure.

Here is an interesting Ubuntu forum post I found while researching I thought everyone reading might get a kick out of it and prove some what educational. It is a little old, but still fun. Have a read – http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=72598

If you have any ideas how people should protect themselves while still using Wine please comment below, or send me an email.